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[GlyphGryph]

Oh, I definitely agree. At the largest cultural level, women have historically (and still, in many ways and places) had it terrible in terms of independence an options. the double standard and difference in focus has been completely understandable. But times are changing, and the focus needs to change with it.

Spoiler: And now, for a bit of a tangent, which might be controversial and probably isn't properly thought out but hey, it's not like there's a whole lot of progress actually being made in this thread so why not introduce something new: (click to show/hide)

I think we take violence both too seriously and not seriously enough. A bit like sex, we've got a very schizophrenic view of it. We're too concerned with the act and not enough with the consequences. The real damage from violence (including sexual violence), in many situations, comes not from the physical damage it causes but from the psychological results - the fear, the uncertainty, the helplessness and loss of agency. 'Fights' between relative equals, though certainly instances of violence, are rightfully seen as less of an issue than beating a helpless child, but I'm not sure if people really understand why - they've got sort of an intuitive feeling that the damage is greater in the second case, but then seem to be okay with that same damage in a situation that doesn't involve violence. It's why a woman slapping a man and a man slapping a women are often seen so differently - because intuitively we understand that the damage isn't from the slap but the psychological impact it leaves on the recipient, and society itself is shaped in such a way that ignoring the average differences in strength, the man's blow is far more damaging.

So in many ways, there's a justification for the double standards and lack of support for men. But one of the real advantages, some of the real strides we've been making is, I think, on the equalization of psychological results. Here we get into an area where I disagree with many hardcore feminists - I think it's far less important to stop men from slapping women than it is to strengthen women enough, culturally and psychologically, that said slap carries only as much psychological weight as when a woman slaps a man. When a woman can shrug off an instance of violence in the way men are expected too, and do it not by pretending but by legitimately feeling they have not been victimized, then they have not actually been victimized. I think this is a noble goal, to allow women to interact with a man in a violent way as equals.

[kaijyuu]

So in many ways, there's a justification for the double standards and lack of support for men. But one of the real advantages, some of the real strides we've been making is, I think, on the equalization of psychological results. Here we get into an area where I disagree with many hardcore feminists - I think it's far less important to stop men from slapping women than it is to strengthen women enough, culturally and psychologically, that said slap carries only as much psychological weight as when a woman slaps a man. When a woman can shrug off an instance of violence in the way men are expected too, and do it not by pretending but by legitimately feeling they have not been victimized, then they have not actually been victimized. I think this is a noble goal, to allow women to interact with a man in a violent way as equals.

Here's how I disagree:

No one, man or woman, should be expected to shrug off violence like that. If they can, great, but if not, they shouldn't be put down as "weak" or some other such bullshit.

[Vector]

Man... no, I don't think so, and that's because I don't think violence against men is okay either.  Too much concern with the act and not enough with the consequences: absolutely.  As for sexual relations, I agree that it is possibly more important to help strengthen women, while understanding that this isn't blaming us for having been culturally emasculated (there is not even a word to describe that happening to women).  But as for the General Program, no, I don't think that demanding we all shrug off violence is right.  There's an obvious slippery slope here, of which I shall not bore you with the details--and what I'm saying is that that's part of the "pretend you don't feel anything" model of masculinity, which, to my understanding, doesn't work all that well.

My personal pet peeve is that crying needs to be dissociated from weakness.  Crying is crying.  We need to stop trying to seed everything with so many cultural messages, because the real situation is so much more complex.

[GlyphGryph]

Okay, I've been pretty heavily misunderstood here, then.

I do not think anyone should be expected to be able to shrug off violence. I think people would be better off in general if they took violence less personally and were ABLE to shrug it off, but it is absurd to think that "demanding" this is even possible. I think the primary damage from many forms of violence comes from insecurity in the victim - but since exploiting that insecurity is exactly the reason a great many folks resort to violence, so that's hardly an excuse for victim blaming.

Much like telling, expecting, or demanding a child to shrug of taunts in school is ineffective as a solution, at the same time it is incredibly valuable to give that child a strong enough foundation, psychologically, that they CAN shrug off the taunts and jabs of detractors. A person who is psychologically healthy will not have their identity and sense of well being shaken by a slap, but we live in a society that does not exactly encourage psychological health, especially in women. A person who has a solid mental foundation can cry without seeing it as weakness in themselves.

Because the damage of a slap doesn't come from the slap, it comes from how a persons view of themselves is changed. Resiliency is valuable for anyone. One of the worst things society has done to women is try to rob them of that resliency, to leave them malleable even when they accrue some amount of power, and it tries to enforce it on it's men (or at least the men it hopes to be successful) because it's obviously so valuable. But we've always been much more effective at destroying it than instilling it.

[Vector]

Ah-ha, now I get you.  Yeah, I think I agree.

[Reelya]

That makes sense.  Thank you.

Having a home and not being accused of rape is a privilege now?

I think that the rape accusation thing is pretty serious.

I also think that "losing your house" and "having your kids taken away from you" is pretty different in scope from what is done to someone who never had control over property and is having control over their body taken away from them.  I'm trying to explain why, traditionally, domestic violence leveraged against women was of a fundamentally different quality, and why there was such focus on it.

There are also patriarchal stereotypes that ... women are the weaker sex and need to be protected, whereas men do not. Surely, these stereotypes play into society's narrative that women require external intervention / special support, whilst men can go hang themselves (i mean that almost literally).

My point with the example, is that the observation that murder rates by females has declined may well be because they don't feel "trapped" could easily apply to men as well. Those i listed - house, kids, reputation, things were just examples of threats a woman could use to control someone. In real, individual cases, there are many other things people use to control each other, those are just the "cliched" ones for women->men, which I used to illustrate things. All of them are based on instilling fear as a prime motivator - not "challenging the male ego".

Fear of homelessness, fear of losing emotional attachment, fear of having your reputation destroyed / losing all your friends / being socially ostracized / going to jail. These are all likely outcomes of those specific threats I outlined.

I guess you're entitled to analyse "having your whole life go down the toilet" as "losing one's male privilege". But that doesn't make sense because the "unprivileged" class in this analysis - the average woman, does not as a whole suffer from those problems - they are not homeless, they are not cut off from loved-ones, they do not have their reputation destroyed, cut off from social support, and are not threatened with jail.

[Vector]

Hey, you.  Read this post and stop attacking me over things I've already covered a billion times.

There's studies cited in some of the links I've tossed that say that the results of psychological abuse are pretty much the same as that of physical abuse.  I won't question those.  However, what I was trying to explain is that back in the day of, y'know, total female financial dependence, "destitute" was simply the cost of leaving.  Not something someone would have to work at, or put any effort into whatsoever.  A lady came with her mobility and ability to control her own circumstances severely curtailed.  This is why I say a lot of muck about institutional society being abusive--there are situations that today we would say "huh, that looks a lot like the influence of domestic violence!" to but were passed down from the powers that be.

I think that we, as a society, take abuse and violence in general far too cavalierly.  I think we don't really care about the aftereffects.  But I think that also, people see a lot of things (lacks of resources) as sexism against men and injustice when there really used to be a huge historical problem leaned in a particular direction; those things were corrected; and now when stuff starts looking similar, there's more resources for women available, because things used to be crazy-bad and the resources are a holdout from that period.

I dunno.  I am positive that some of this is caused by actual shitty attitudes.  And I'm also pretty sure that part of it is caused by residuum, which I want to bring up so that we don't forget.

There should be more support for everyone.  The problem is that mainstream society really doesn't seem to care.

[Reelya]

Disagreeing isn't an "attack". I could also claim you "attacked" me by not automatically agreeing with my original premise, right? I'm just remembering that you attacked me over using the term "female" - now that's an unfounded attack right there. You actually insinuated I view women as nothing but animals because I used "female" as a noun.

Rather than saying something "a billion times" you've barely addressed the two points I raised, if at all. The only real "attack" was where I disagreed that any problem for a man was merely a "loss of male privilege". Well, you concede that being free from false rape accusations aren't "male privilege" at least. I also discussed how the exact same patriarchal stereotypes play into the refusal to admit that female->male abuse is a "thing" - those same stereotypes you'd be 100% against depending on the discussion. That bias in problem perception was actually a major point in the link you provided for me. And a lot of the writings here seem to portray the exact same interpretation prejudice highlighted in that very link.

Let's get back to the issue that was core to the question - the murder rate, and how support structures might have mitigated it. This is exactly what the articles on gender bias in attitudes to abuse (what you linked btw Vector) was talking about: Wife murders husband: "he must have been abusive", "what did he do to deserve it?", husband murders wife: "that poor woman", "he was clearly abusing her". In each case, the man is framed as the guilty party, whether he murders, or was murdered.

Now, i'm not really advocating anything here for men in the last two pages. What I am doing is taking palsch's analysis and applying it in a gender-neutral way. What I showed was that a gender-neutral interpretation of the phenomena is compatible with the data we have. Advocacy for males is pure secondary, especially since the goal of that advocacy was entirely stated to be the reduction in the female murder rate. This is "advocacy for people" plain and simple, and it's a bit of a twist to say I'm saying "men got it bad boohoo!".

I think that we, as a society, take abuse and violence in general far too cavalierly.  I think we don't really care about the aftereffects.  But I think that also, people see a lot of things (lacks of resources) as sexism against men and injustice when there really used to be a huge historical problem leaned in a particular direction; those things were corrected; and now when stuff starts looking similar, there's more resources for women available, because things used to be crazy-bad and the resources are a holdout from that period.

There are specifically, a very poor amount of resources for men leaving abusive relationships. Who had it worse 40 years ago, and who "has it worse" overall as a gender-aggregate, well that's not relevant to what's happen at this moment to individuals for a start. It doesn't matter if males have more average wealth, taking away crisis shelters from males wouldn't "even up the score" in any logical way. Because people are individuals, each with individual circumstances, not aggregates. That same "averages" theory would imply that giving more money to wealthy women would justify taking money away from poor women - "average" wealth by gender would be the same, so we shouldn't worry about how it distributed right? Likewise, a man in crisis isn't helped by "men on average have higher social mobility" or any other pronouncements.

Remember the original point was asking whether more men's services would actually alleviate the female murder rate in the same way that services for women are said to have alleviate the killing of males. My point was that, that same theory could be applied to both genders, and it makes a testable prediction - since male support is light-years behind female support, male murders of spouses won't have fallen as much as the inverse, exactly what we see in the data. And it's further supported as a conjecture due to the fact that before the support for women, the murder rate was "on par" between the sexes, regardless of the fact that current Western society is far less sexist than Western society up until the 1970's. It may still be pretty sexist, but it was inarguably more sexist back then.

The evidence (in a citation provided by you, Vector), is that there's a pretty even amount of "abusers" of both genders. Either gender can attempt to end their abuse in a number of ways. We shouldn't give one gender an automatic "free pass" to jump straight to murder, and make all sorts of extra critical judgements of the other gender based on how they chose to deal with it.

This also could be connected to the studies that found male offender programs based on the patriarchy model don't work. The overall point is that trying to apply an incorrect model of male issues harms women as well as men - as the faulty male offender programs indicate firsthand. Palsch linked an article where the writer observes women doing, what would basically be construed as abuse if the genders were reversed (this point was discussed in Vector's Wikipedia link). The men in that article were said to "lose their temper", in the face of visible goading and taunts by their spouse, and we shake our head at how weak they are "they should have walked away". The men were noted to be trying all the tactics that are meant to defuse the problem - according to the men's offender programs that have been discredited in Vector's citation. This shows firsthand how having a faulty model of a problem, actually prevents the problem being resolved.

[Max White]

Are we surprised a patriarchy model don't work for reducing violence in men?
Really, telling people "You can stop being the violent, hateful people you were taught to be all your lives!" is not a help program, it is a form of abuse. It enforces the view that men are either violent monsters or emotionless heros.
If you keep telling somebody that because of their gender, something totally out of their control, they have been encouraged to treat women unfairly, then when they are going to blame men when it is a man suffering from abuse at the hand of a woman. When you keep telling people they are monsters, even when you add "But you could stop, but I'm not saying how", they are going to think it.

Think about it. Telling men that discrimination is because of a male patriarchy and if only they would change their behavior things would be better, while limiting mens access to resources like mental help services and shelters.

Dutton found that men who are emotionally or physically abused often encounter victim blaming that erroneously presumes the man either provoked or deserved the mistreatment of their female partners.[70] Similarly, domestic violence victims will often blame their own behavior, rather than the violent actions of the abuser. Victims may try continually to alter their behavior and circumstances in order to please their abuser.[71] Oftentimes, this results in further dependence of the individual on their abuser, as they may often change certain aspects of their lives that limit their resources. Studies show that emotional abusers frequently aim to exercise total control of different aspects of family life. This behavior is only supported when the victim of the abuse aims to please their abuser.[38]

[Vector]

I have no idea whom the two of you think you're arguing so passionately with.

[Neonivek]

I have no idea whom the two of you think you're arguing so passionately with.

How about anytime someone brings up MEN! as one ubiquous group of evil meanies?

[penguinofhonor]

You know the vast majority of women's shelters will accept abused men too, right? At least all the ones I know of will.

I know it's not as good has having ones specifically targeted at them, but it's hardly as bad as "limiting their access" to shelters.

Also, I'm not sure when "domestic violence against women has a lot to do with patriarchy" turned into "the patriarchy is the cause of all bad things."

[Vector]

Here's a surprise: no one has done that, Neonivek.

[Neonivek]

Here's a surprise: no one has done that, Neonivek.

Anita has.

Remember everything is a man's fault!

[Max White]

Not as much arguing with anybody on that point, or I would have addressed them, just adding to the discussion that the idea that trying to present men as violent and domineering but reformable isn't going to help anybody, men or women.

Here's a surprise: no one has done that, Neonivek.

How about every time somebody uses the word patriarchy?